Wednesday, 24 April 2013

I'm going to take the focus of this learning log away from solely being about what's happening in the LA Comp class, to more of school as a whole presently in my life. Being so close to graduation, the excitement is getting to me a little too much and school is slipping away. I have been getting distracted by other things, and putting too much time and energy into everything but my schoolwork. Thinking about how soon this will all be over, and yet not having any idea about how my next years are going to play out was helping me put off assignments for weeks in some cases.

In the midst of all this, I am learning that putting things off, such as my schoolwork, does not in fact give you more time for other things. It does in fact make your future schedule busier than it needs to be, and create tension and stress for not only me, but my teachers as well!

With that being said, as a graduating student, with the time I have left I will be working on staying on top of things, and set back the level of my procrastination on things including: my poetry assignments, PCRs, Learning Logs, and reading the assigned books.

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

The first week back to school after a break is always a mess, but I have never experienced three weeks away mid semester before, and I can say with confidence I never want to do that again. Jumping right back into writing papers, and reading multiple books right off the hop made my brain go insane! Nevertheless, I found a way to get a few things accomplished.

For my passion project, I originally thought I would simply write a research paper on the origin of ear stretching. For a couple of years, if someone didn't remember my name, 'the guy with big ears' would have just the same effect as remembering me as 'Owen'. As i sat in class about a month ago, while sliding my pen in and out of my earlobe, we were asked to think of things we would like to know, questions we had. As i realized where my pen was, I thought why did people ever do this? So I looked into it. As I looked into it, I realized what is simply a fashion or self expression statement for me, has a history of thousands of years and symbolizes different things. What I find interesting about it is that many different cultures and foreign tribes originally stretched their ears for many different purposes, without knowing others were doing the same thing. Some cultures used it to symbolize wealth, others for knowledge, and some even to symbolize their marital status.

Being something that arose thousands of years ago, with no direct origin, I decided a switch of outcomes was in order. I felt a research paper was too restricting. With finding all this information, and intriguing pictures I want to be able to display, I think that a print article, possibly just an online article is more fitting.

We have discussed in class how the slightly unorganized, yet organized format of this class is more fitting to real life. In this first week and a bit back to school, I have really appreciated the schedule this project allows me because not only does life happen, but other courses happen. As my work load continues to increase, I feel my time would be better spent writing papers, rather than blog posts.